Bayern Munich defender Javi Martinez has made the outlandish – if not entirely serious – claim that he created the original concept of the vastly successful ‘Hunger Games’ franchise.
For the uninitiated, the Hunger Games are a series of novels written by American novelist Suzanne Collins which were later turned into a series of equally lucrative movies starring Jennifer Lawrence as some kind of bow-wielding dystopian child warrior.
Discussing his love of writing with German magazine Socrates, Martinez said:
Writing is a great pleasure for me, even as a teenager I started to write a book.
And believe it or not, the plot was pretty much the same as ‘The Hunger Games’.
It was strange (to see the Hunger Games movie).
I was sitting in the cinema and thought: ‘It does not exist, that’s my idea, which I had years ago, the creators must have stolen my computer!’
While most would instantly realise that Martinez wasn’t airing a wholly serious grievance, the Bayern player still faced a significant amount of backlash on social media, with people pointing out that Hunger Games was actually inspired by a Japanese film called ‘Battle Royal’ that was in turn inspired by a novel written in 1999 when Martinez was just 10 years old.
The Spaniard then actually felt the need to clarify that he was joking by following up on Twitter with a photo of him reading ‘Night Over Water’ – another book shamelessly “stolen” from him, this time by author Ken Follett.
— Javi Martínez (@Javi8martinez) 8 February 2019
“Not everything is meant to be dead serious,” Martinez quipped below.
In a perfect or even vaguely sensible world, he wouldn’t have had to explain that – yet here we are.